Follow this Thread

Integration with Constant Contact

I am working with a local Chamber of Commerce who currently use Constant Contact to send several types of campaigns in a month (announcements, "Member Promotion" campaigns, newsletters).

We hope to send their "Member Promotion" campaigns only from Campaign Monitor, leaving their other campaigns with Constant Contact.

Can we connect a "Members" list in our Campaign Monitor account to their "Members" list in CC but have unsubscribes/bounces from both lists reflect within each other? I want to make sure that anyone who unsubscribes from a "Member Promotion" campaign in Campaign Monitor will not be a recipient in a future Constant Contact campaign and vice versa.

Looking for someone who may be able to make this work using the APIs. Thanks.

Can we connect a "Members" list in our Campaign Monitor account to their "Members" list in CC but have unsubscribes/bounces from both lists reflect within each other?

The short answer as far as I'm aware is 'No', because CM requires its campaigns to be run off its own subscriber lists. While CC does provides synchronised list management with a few other CRM packages, it's understandable that no list management service is going to provide synchronisation for competitor list services. Having said that, both CC and CM APIs make the job fairly easy, if a bit tedious and risky, depending on how you're keeping the lists up to date.

A full technical solution would involve initialising and managing duplicate lists in CM and CC, and using the API to keep these lists in sync at all times. Then if, for example, someone unsubscribed after seeing your CM campaign, your hooks would take them off both CM and CC lists at the same time. All technically possible and not too difficult, but would require the development of multiple hooks ie. wherever you were doing something to the CC list, you'd need to do the same thing to CM.

An alternative is to simply create and import the CC list at a point in time into a temporary CM list for a single campaign, and make sure your unsubscribe hooks took subscribers off both lists for the duration of the campaign, after which you'd delete the CM list and start again for the next campaign. This is a bit dangerous as there are a few sync point risks.

I don't think there's any getting over the fact that what you'd need to do is manage two lists and keep them synchronised, either for the duration of a campaign, or permanently. I think what you're asking is a common enough issue when transitioning between two list management services, but the best technical advice (which is understandably not always possible) is to bite the bullet and use either CM or CC, all the way.

Thanks for taking the time to respond and do it so well. Much appreciated.

I heard from CM team and they tend to agree with you. Unfortunately, I am going to have to use both CM and CC but make sure both lists are identical, applying unsubscribes/additions to both lists before deliveries.